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- 🔙 Reverse Benchmarks & Elevating 🍒
🔙 Reverse Benchmarks & Elevating 🍒
Thinking about small changes for big impact
Michael Hatfield
August 03, 2025
Gif by Runninglateclub on Giphy
Me: Reverse Benchmarks and Elevating
You: Have You Slept Enough?
Me: “Nope”.
I hope I thread the needle for all of you this week - bringing more of my own thoughts here, mixed with the newer format. Knowing this reader base, I think you all can get down with both of these concepts and leverage them beyond the partnership.
Reverse Benchmarking: Rory Sutherland dropped something on Modern Wisdom that's been eating at me: the "reverse benchmark." Instead of copying what the #1 company does, what if you identified what they're NOT doing and made that your competitive advantage? He tied it back to Will Guidara so I was hooked. Read on to walk it through to your partnership.
Date Nights: Understandably, date nights are fleeting in our infant-driven household. And that’s OK, they’ll make a comeback very soon, one way or another. It’s just so iconic of busy, hard-working parents and a moment of anticipation, freedom, and enjoyment. And yet in talking with customers and prospects they can often be “fine”, or just become yet another preparatory item that becomes weight in the mental load. So I tried to find ways to elevate the few date nights you get on the calendar.
Can you do 1 or more of these things? I’d be grateful.
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The Reverse Benchmark in Business (and Life)
Roger Martin wrote that "benchmarking is for losers" because while you're catching up to industry standards, the leaders are already innovating beyond them. Southwest didn't match Delta's hub-and-spoke model - they went point-to-point. Tesla didn't make better gas engines - they skipped them entirely.
The same principle applies to partnerships. While "successful couples" optimize for elaborate communication frameworks and conflict prevention, what are they missing?
From our work w/ couples and recent relationship research: even couples who look perfect struggle with something fundamental. They've mastered monthly check-ins and grand gestures, but they're terrible at micro-recovery. This pushes me past my comfort zone on sharing “counseling” type stuff, but it really did make a lot of sense.
The reverse benchmark insight: While everyone else focuses on preventing negative moments or processing them later through big conversations, exceptional couples get brutally good at bouncing back from small friction in real-time.
Research shows concurrent effects matter more than lagged ones - meaning what you do in the moment of minor conflict matters more than how you discuss it later. Most relationship advice teaches you to eliminate the 2-second eye roll or sharp tone.
But what if the real edge is getting exceptionally fast at recovering from those moments?
The couple that masters the immediate:
"Wait, that came out wrong"
"Sorry, I'm being an ass"
The 3-second reset after minor friction
I think there’s something to optimizing for resilience. We’re always working on improvement, but this might work better when you can’t change those zebra stripes.
Date Night Tweaks
Here's what I'm hearing: "We know we need date nights, but by the time we plan something, get a sitter, and figure out where to go, we're exhausted before we start."
Or: "We got so behind on planning that we went to our usual spot, talked about kids and work, came home feeling like we checked a box which was…fine.”
So the first step is, no surprise, actually executing on your intentions. It’s hard. I struggle with it, as the weight of work, competing schedules and clearing the short window of time needed to actually get ahead of a reservation and the semblance of a plan.
From there I thought of all the reasons we do indeed love date night, and how we can “elevate it”. I’m not talking some ornate Hallmark movie date crap that requires an 8-figure salary. I’m thinking more like how you can elevate Taco Tuesday with a couple of pro moves and “wrapping” a basic formula with a few Michelin-star hacks.
ANTICIPATION
Half the joy I get out of a date night is looking forward to it. Calendar it 4+ weeks out. A month flies by and having it booked gives you both something to look forward to. And it gives you something to remind each other of that’s exciting. Send a text a week out about how pumped you are it’s coming up. Buy him a new shirt to wear in advance. Send flowers to your wife for the morning of to denote the excitement. These pairings are easy, and level up the single note of date night.
NOVELTY
Lean into novelty. I struggle with this one. Yes, we are ppl that love a good restaurant and a perfectly concocted cocktail. But there are other options.
Still book the dinner. Before it go do one of those sort of corny mixology classes or that special exhibit at the museum that you never go to that is “for tourists”. Even if it’s a little corny it gets you out of the norm. It gets you talking about something different (even if it’s “God I felt a little like a tool there” and have a laugh).
You’ll likely never regret it and you might find something new-ish that you like…even if just 1x. It’s a story that you can take with you.
ELIMINATE DECISION FATIGUE
One person plans completely, other shows up. Planner makes ALL decisions - where, when, what to discuss. Alternate each date night.
It’s a concept you might recognize from parenting. If you both dogpile onto solving the same problem for a kid, it’s likely too many cooks in the kitchen. It gets harder, not easier, and increases friction - more communication, more ideas, etc. I’m a broken record about the Paradox of Choice. Reduce some thinking for your partner and half the gift and excitement is the stress-free lead-up and the element of surprise.
Instead of looking for how everyone else is doing it, you can find a hidden gem that you can own. And instead of getting overwhelmed trying to do too much, you can take what you already do and level up a little.
At Appairent, we’re thinking about how to make this more automatic for people so they can just show up and enjoy. I think there’s a lot of satisfaction in this, and in my own experience it’s juuuuust out of reach of the chaos that tends to take up our calendars and our mind share. If the planning and execution was as easy as a single shot AI prompt, I think there’s something there.
🍻
Hat